Capitalism and Socialism: Fear Orientation vs. Shame Orientation

 Our Future and Four Horror Narratives

Looking into the future is sometimes done with hope and confidence, but sometimes also with concern and fear. These worries and fears are based on current experiences and facts that we have gathered from various information channels. The emotional charge of these images of the future comes from our childhood and prenatal experiences, as well as from collective traumas from history.

We can distinguish four different scenarios, all of which overlap and interact with each other somewhere, but which are also served, propagated and reinforced separately by political parties and groups: 

• the scenario of a desolidarized society
• the scenario of a society flooded from outside
• the scenario of dwindling prosperity
• the scenario of a destroyed nature.

The first narrative is about social inequality. It is an ancient theme of humanity that has arisen at least since the transition from tribal cultures to arable cultures about 10,000 years ago. Many fairy tales and legends deal with the hard-hearted rich and the suffering poor. Since industrialization, the problem has massively intensified, and political movements under the banner of socialism and communism have emerged, dedicated to the struggle for greater social justice.

Since that time, the facts show a permanently increasing divergence between the accumulation of wealth by the very few on the one hand and the working poverty, old-age poverty, single-parent poverty and unemployment poverty of the very many on the other, with a middle class in between that is increasingly in danger of slipping into poverty. The climate crisis adds another dimension to this development, because it has a completely different impact when someone has to survive the heat in a crowded slum under a corrugated iron roof or in a secluded and fully air-conditioned villa by the sea. Life courses, dates of death, and causes of death are significantly influenced by position in the social fabric, which is defined by the imbalance in the disposal of material resources. Those who are rich not only live better, but also longer.

The Indispensability of Social Balance

Reason tells us that a certain degree of social balance is needed for people to be able to form a community. Not everyone needs to earn the same amount or have the same wealth, but there must be a framework within which the differences operate, as well as permeabilities that allow for equality or comparability of opportunity. For otherwise there is a danger that society will fall apart and a war of all against all will break out, or that there will be a closing off of the happy few in their fortified ghettos from the mass of the badly off. A dynamic balance between performance norms and individual strengths and weaknesses is necessary to reduce the stress of survival for the individuals and to make the creative potential that is in all people available for each other and for a humane development.

It is also easy to understand that during crises and disasters, those who are socially and monetarily weaker suffer even more severely than those who can do better because of their means. At the time of the rush of refugees and asylum seekers to Central Europe, there were the wealthy who fled from the refugees to their vacation domicile on the Balearic or Canary Islands. There were and are similar departures in the current pandemic times. The climate crisis, like any other, is always also a social crisis.

Horror Scenarios and Ideologies

Horror narratives are designed to wake up humanity and motivate it to act. But they have a tendency to become loaded with ideologies - as long as there are unresolved emotional energies behind the reasonable concerns, i.e. mainly fears and feelings of shame.

The ideological ballast comes to light where the background and causes of the imbalance are mythologized by identifying apparent masterminds behind developments. Either it is a few conspirators who pull the strings and play with people's fate, or it is "capitalism" that steers humanity to its downfall with its destructive power. When it comes to responsibility for "evil," social revolutionaries tend to use truncated concepts. In this way, the complex systems that drive these developments are reduced to simple images of the enemy, which then appear so overpowering that there seems to be no basis for political counter-activity and anything done to improve the situation or correct the destructive tendencies can be dismissed as a symptom cure. The ideology, which goes back to Karl Marx, says that the whole society must be overturned in order to do away with the specter of capitalism. Until that can be done, everything will only get worse, because even any attempt at reform will stabilize capitalism and make it more resistant.

But the communist revolution, when we overlook the history of modern times, has never really and fundamentally succeeded. Today, the capitalist system operates unabated throughout the world, and one of its strongest powers is the communist People's Republic of China. Communism (or "real existing socialism"), as it has appeared in history, is a system of rule that establishes power structures and controls and suppresses possible opponents. The economy serves as a field of experimentation that is tinkered with using the instruments of power. Experience has shown that any attempt to completely subordinate capitalism to political power has had disastrous effects on economic performance. This was a major reason why the communist system in Eastern Europe went down without a sound in 1989. It was not possible to look that quickly, already many of the former standard bearers of socialism became the most successful capitalists. 

Chinese communism produced famines and other economic disasters as long as attempts were made to eradicate capitalism with political power. Only when more and more capitalist elements were allowed in did economic successes then set in, and with it corruption of previously unknown proportions.

No Communism with Traumatized People

Karl Marx understood much of the nature of capitalism, but his conclusion that capitalism must be eliminated by revolution of the oppressed masses was short-sighted. What Marx overlooked was the interwoven nature of capitalism into the human condition. (Karl Marx was not familiar with psychology and even less with trauma theory). Capitalist thought and action is an aspect of being human and is intimately connected to the emotional drives of fear and greed. Psychologically, capitalism represents the playground of a widespread survival strategy: Coping with the fear of one's own extinction through the accumulation of goods. Paradoxically, fear increases further when more security is to be created from the life threats posed by greed-led acts of accumulation. Fear begets greed, and greed increases fear. Thus, capitalism only mirrors fear management and in reality reproduces it constantly.

As we have seen, we can understand capitalism as the interactive system driven by the emotions of fear and greed, which has developed from it a life of its own that can no longer be controlled by single individuals. Everyone is subjected to it, no one can completely escape its pull, and consequently everyone also participates in ensuring that the power of the capitalist system continues to grow. (We all have to buy food and other goods that are produced and distributed within the framework of capitalism. With every price we pay, we consent to these conditions of production and distribution. We all have to earn our living and sell our labor power, thus agreeing to the rules of the labor market and wage labor).

Capitalism thus arises as a community product that operates supra-individually. It is composed of the sum of people's actions motivated by capitalism. Therefore, capitalism cannot simply be destroyed; this is the illusion through which communist ideas become an ideology. People and their emotional survival strategies remain the same whatever system is installed on the political level. People do not lose their fears and greed as a way of coping with fear, merely if the political and economic system is regulated differently. Every communist dictator and apparatchik is historical proof of this.

So capitalism is not a historical error or an evil power that has come over humanity, but the collective creative attempt of humanity to ensure its survival from a certain stage of complexity of social development (I have described it as the fifth stage of the evolution of consciousness). It takes a delicate balance of individual and social motives at each stage to ensure collective survival. The predominance of individual survival incentives over collective ones in the capitalist system shows its roots in people's primal fears. For fear always calls attention to the threat to one's own life from others. In fear, other people become hostile and dangerous beings to us.

From the point of view of psychology, in capitalism the fear of shame holds sway. Shame demands social consideration in one's acts of survival: When we behave selfishly in an emergency situation, for example, when we crowd onto the last boat before others in a shipwreck, shame calls in. When intensive care beds are in short supply during a pandemic, we must do everything we can to avert the shame that arises when we fail to do everything humanly possible to cure the sick.

The threatening potential of capitalism lies in the fact that it has succeeded in largely disempowering shame. It is not by chance that the most shame-free people are at the top of capitalist machinations. This is precisely why we need shame-driven systems that balance the power of fear-driven systems. Only in this way will there be a balance at the level of survival impulses. 

Here we see the indispensable task of socialism. If the counterforces against capitalism are not maintained and strengthened, fear-driven individualism inevitably takes over, and the principle of solidarity goes out the window. The freely unleashed struggle of everyone against everyone is the beginning of the end of humanity. In contrast, socialism demands solidarity between the stronger and the weaker, between the richer and the poorer. There is a deeply human need for balance between top and bottom, and massive anxieties arise when it is disregarded.  

Capitalism not only promises security for one's survival anxieties by generally increasing wealth, but at the same time feeds them by demanding more and more from people. This is the destrucitve feedback system for which people in industrial and post-industrial society have to pay an increasing toll of physical and, increasingly, mental exploitation. Here, too, a socialized shame reports back, pointing to the shame that, despite the amazing achievements of modern luxury societies, the quality of life and life satisfaction have not increased, but that people are afflicted by new fears, by greed, envy, arrogance and self-doubt.

Fear Orientation and Shame Orientation in Interplay

As long as there is no awareness that capitalism is driven by fear and socialism by shame, the distribution of power will swing back and forth between the two forces. At one time one will rule, at another time the other will rule. For the electorate vacillates just as much between these patterns of emotion, which they both carry within them. In the meantime, many socialists have become a little more capitalist and some capitalists a little more shamefaced. But the basic structure has not changed: The anxieties that capitalism pretends to reduce are actually increased by pressures on individuals. It is similar with the shame that is supposed to be calmed under socialism: It seeks other fields of activity once social balance is realized on a broader basis. 

An example is the (shameless) surveillance of individuals, which was installed in all communist states. It was intended to maintain a sense of shame among people so that they would subordinate their individual aspirations, their egoisms, to the collective. In reality, however, the power-hungry egoists in the ruling power apparatus prevailed over the subjects, often with extreme physical and mental cruelty.  

Another typical example is formed by the forced self-shaming performed as rituals of power affirmation in these systems: The absurd confessions of defendants in the Stalinist show trials and the forced self-criticism of officials under Chinese communism testify to the instrumentalization of shame for the purposes of maintaining power and suppressing individual freedoms.

Contemporary China also demonstrates the interplay between a capitalist and a socialist dictatorship. After recently growing the Chinese economy at record rates and producing more and more billionaires, the government now seems to be steering back in the shame direction. Shame barriers are being imposed on the entertainment industry, large corporations are being reprimanded, and rampant working hours are being restricted. Under the rubric of "general prosperity," the social side of Chinese socialism is being reactivated. 

Beyond the Survival Pattern: Optimism instead of Horror

The horror of the scenario of a society diverging along the wealth gap only clears when the influence of ideology fades from the contexts. Ideologies tend to produce a reality-distorting black-and-white view and friend-foe thinking. The unprejudiced view of reality enables the actions necessary to counteract desolidarization and bring to bear the social intentions inherent in every human being. The commitment to greater social justice at all levels is then not driven by shame, but by the desire for a just and humane society, a deeply human concern. It is a concern that must be formulated, demanded and urged again and again for the sake of a just society.

Much has already been achieved on this path, much is still open and must be tackled with all our strength. Many people are committed to these issues. There is much cause for optimism, and this is the attitude that releases and focuses energies.     

Capitalistic Trauma Trance

"It's the economy, stupid."

Why is economic growth such an effective killer argument when it comes to climate protection measures? 

A simple explanation would say: this is due to the propaganda used to represent the lobbying interests of companies that would see their profits dwindle if they had to change their ways of production. We would not have to be impressed by this. It is part of the business world that production has to modernize on an ongoing basis, and if modernization now consists of producing in a climate-friendly way, then that is simply the task that the company has to face up to.

What often happens, however, is that the ecological debate stops there and climate measures are shot down because economic growth would be jeopardized, jobs would be lost, the economy would shrink, everyone would be worse off, and finally everything would collapse.

The Clinton slogan: "it's the economy, stupid," could be translated this way: It's all about the economy, and if you don't understand that, you're a fool. Or: The economy is the most important area around which everything else revolves and must revolve. Or: The economy affects people most directly and most effectively, and everything else is secondary.

The Trauma of Capitalism

The fact that we understand such slogans and consider them as plausible and correct is related to the collective trauma caused by capitalism. The economy is a subfield in any human society, but since the introduction of the capitalist economic system, this subfield has taken over the central position. This leading role has been deeply engraved in our consciousness. It is integrated into all educational and training processes and is drummed into children and young people from an early age. They are supposed to be made fit "for life" in schools, i.e., they are supposed to be able to exist in the economy and build an "existence." Capitalism has thus succeeded in making human existence dependent on economic success: If we don't make it in the economy, we lose our existence.

What has happened here? Of course, people always knew that their survival depended on having enough to eat and a safe place to stay. But they also knew that they could never do it alone, instead that they could only succeed if everyone stuck together. 

In the early days, our ancestors could and had to provide themselves in their communities for everything that was necessary for survival. Especially since the Neolithic revolution, the economy has become increasingly complex due to the progressive division of labor. A system of interdependencies emerged, which was then intensified by the capitalist system with its principles of profit maximization and competition. Whereas in the Middle Ages it was regulated how much a craftsman could earn, under capitalism the one who produced the cheapest and most efficiently was supposed to outdo the other competitors. A relatively balanced system of mutual dependencies, in which social balance plays an important role, becomes a system of competition according to the motto: everyone against everyone. Whoever fights too little goes down. You perish before I perish. Existential fear provides the underlying drive for economic action and is implanted in every participant in the economy. 

As I have proposed elsewhere, capitalism is a fear-driven system that imposes a chronic stress burden on everyone. The hidden ideology of this system suggests that survival is permanently precarious. One can never try hard enough to finally be safe from going under. People are forced to "voluntarily" inflict violence on themselves, not at gunpoint, but with the fear of survival implanted. 

The Capitalistic Trance

From a purely logical point of view, the environmental problem that mankind has maneuvered itself into takes precedence over the economic problems. For on a planet that can no longer be inhabited, no economy can be run either. The economy would therefore have to do everything in its power to avert this global threat, and for this it would need the compelling guidelines from politics. But because in capitalist thinking, short-term gain is always better than a long-term perspective, the representatives of the economy drum out their slogans about the primacy of the economy and its growth, no matter what other costs this causes and what problems arise from it in the longer term. Because the general public, or the state, is liable for damages resulting from economic processes; these need not concern the representatives of the economy. 

But why is politics not in a position to prescribe to the economy the framework conditions that are necessary so that the environmental catastrophe can be averted? Apparently, like most people, it is just as much under the pressure exerted by survival anxiety, the driving force of capitalism. Collective traumas lead to collective dissociations, and dissociations lead to trance states. As soon as there is talk of threats to the economy, most politicians enter a trance state in which they forget everything else they are responsible for. 

For most, waking up from this entranced state apparently only occurs when experiences occur that are so powerful that they can no longer be ignored. Disappearing glaciers or abnormally hot summers are unpleasant experiences, but we can live with them. A storm that knocks down your house or a flood that washes away everything you own can no longer be so easily ignored. 

The danger is that, just as climatic conditions and all the phenomena dependent on them change, we slowly adapt to the changed circumstances and therefore delay everything that would be necessary in terms of new laws and new habits of behavior. We behave like the frogs in the glass of water that is slowly heated, and we do not notice the misery we are in until we are already scalded. (By the way, the story with the frogs is a fake, frogs are not that stupid, they jump out of the water as soon as it gets too hot for them).

We have a choice: the trauma trance, driven by capitalist fear of survival, or waking up, driven by the will to survive and by responsibility for humanity and the planet.